The suburbs have never been so sinister. A house is marked with a diagonal cross, painted on the weatherboards in blood red. Another funereal house has been greyed out, negating all the features, except for a circle in the middle, as if a target cast by a search light at dusk. And elsewhere, houses have been set alight, as if the ritual of marking condemns them to incineration.

Marked: Ian Strange's Harvard Street 2012.

These tense and gloomy pictures at the NGV are created by Ian Strange, an Australian-born artist who works in the US on a scale that American photography thrives upon. Strange doesn't just take photos of the suburbs but takes possession of them, finding their alienated soul like an exorcist and then returning their blackest magic upon their empty spaces.

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Strange arrives not just with a camera and film crew but saws, cherry picker and fire brigade. The artist also brings along painting machinery to extend his own background as a street artist. His photographs are interventions in which some unloved bungalow becomes his passive canvas and, depending on the dark forces, meets its nemesis.

Though now living in Brooklyn, New York, Strange is no stranger to suburbs, because he grew up in Perth. It's an irony, however, that a street artist should revisit places that have zero street culture. In the suburbs, there's a thoroughfare but no pedestrians upon it; and the bungalows that recede from the uninhabited street seem to lurk in suspicious surveillance, watching in the unlikely event that some stray soul should intrude in this graveyard of family life.

America has special reason to bring blood-vengeance upon the bungalow, because these glorified shacks were the cause of the nation's imminent economic perdition. Not only is suburbia resented by environmentalists because of its dependence on cars but the market in houses was artificially supported by unsecured mortgages; and a meltdown of the financial sector was feared when banks began to repossess these assets.

Strange paints a skull on one of the free-standing specimens: they're all caught in the artist's cross-hairs, all doomed, like firewood, which the residents will need when the fossil fuel runs out. In his hands, this new-world patriotic symbol of family loses its innocence; they're a discredited domestic archetype that chews up the planet's resources and leaves us feeling empty and poor.

Similar thoughts are prompted by Play Money at Counihan Gallery, which reveals how suburban space is conditioned. Artificial financial patterns prop up the lone bungalows with a regulatory framework as arbitrary as those of a board game. One of the artists, Elvis Richardson, in fact draws up her own Monopoly-style bank notes with many of the scandals of Australian urban planning emblazoned upon them.

As the curator Jane O'Neill says, Richardson ''walks us through a shameful catalogue of bungled priorities including suburban sprawl'' which somehow completes the Aboriginal dispossession, turning the sacred country into dysfunctional wasteland.

Though neither as macabre nor megalomaniac as Suburban, Play Money is more political and sarcastic. For Ronnie van Hout, a house is either a kind of person with legs or a dead weight that has flattened its owner. And for Sadie Chandler, the numbers that signify addresses are stacked upon one another with an instability that reflects numbers in the bank.

Delving into the history of suburbia, Patrick Pound has amassed a large collection of images showing people standing outside their houses, which are bald and desolate, disconnected from the street and lacking a sense of community.

The problem is that suburbia hangs around until it's no longer the outskirts but the inner city, as with Brunswick itself, where the exhibition is staged. The modest cottages represent hugely sub-optimal land-use, which has the consequence of pushing up the price of inner-city accommodation.

If planning were deregulated, the naive cottages of Brunswick would be replaced with something resembling a city. Maybe the municipality could engage Ian Strange. He has a very good plan, I believe.